


How to Disappear Completely

by edibleflowers



Category: Torchwood
Genre: Children of Earth Compliant, Children of Earth Fix-It, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-10
Updated: 2012-09-10
Packaged: 2017-11-13 23:29:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,422
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/508934
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/edibleflowers/pseuds/edibleflowers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jack thinks that he'll never stop paying for his sins.</p>
            </blockquote>





	How to Disappear Completely

**Author's Note:**

> I started writing this not long after Children of Earth aired, but it took a long time to find the story of it. It is CoE-compliant and also a CoE-fixit. Some of my usual pseudoscience is also going on in this. And oddly enough, I wrote this long before ever having seen The Prisoner; go figure.
> 
> Originally posted on March 9, 2010, on my Livejournal.
> 
>  _Do not stand at my grave and weep;  
>  I am not there. I do not sleep.  
> I am a thousand winds that blow.  
> I am the diamond glints on snow.  
> I am the sunlight on ripened grain.  
> I am the gentle autumn rain.  
> When you awaken in the morning's hush  
> I am the swift uplifting rush  
> Of quiet birds in circled flight.  
> I am the soft stars that shine at night.  
> Do not stand at my grave and cry;  
> I am not there. I did not die._  
> \--"Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep", Mary E. Frye

Jack Harkness wants nothing more to disappear. The worst part of being unable to die, he thinks at one bleary, drunken point, is that he can't seek that oblivion that he so desperately craves. When he does try it, hoping that one of his suicide attempts will take and he'll finally be able to escape the misery, every revival is harsher and more painful than ever it's been in the past.

He avoids Cardiff -- all of Great Britain, for that matter -- for as long as he can stand it. The civilised world is still reeling from the narrowly-averted threat of the 456, and everywhere he goes, he sees children clutched close, hands held whether they like it or not. He knows people are glad to have their children safe, but at the same time he hates them all. Every child he sees has Stephen's blue eyes and blond bowl cut. Every mother seems to look at him with Alice's accusing glare.

Jack thinks that he'll never stop paying for his sins.

Six months on and the world has returned to its everyday functioning. There's no doubt that the 456 have changed the way the citizens of Earth see the stars around them; suddenly space exploration has leapt to the forefront of every government budget, and proposals and schemes for protection from otherworldly invaders are on everyone's lips, debated hotly on the evening news and radio talk shows. Jack ignores most of it. These days, he doesn't care about protecting the Earth or arming the human race against the future. His old prophesy -- that the twenty-first century would be when everything changed -- has come to pass. The Slitheen attempt to destroy the planet; the Sycorax; Canary Wharf; the Racnoss; a spaceship nearly crashing into Buckingham Palace; the Earth's temporary relocation to another part of the universe; and finally the 456's abduction attempt: it took a lot of work, but humanity is finally convinced that they're far from alone in the universe. They are, in fact, insignificant in comparison to the other races who have been travelling the stars for endless centuries; but that aspect is something they'll have to gradually accept.

Jack doesn't care anymore. Nothing he sees makes him want to stay on this planet with its useless governments that will bind humanity and hold it back. If the 456's desire of their own children for use as drugs couldn't goad these people into rebellion and action against snivelling, cowardly politicians desperate to save their own hides, nothing will.

He finds a contact in Buenos Aires, a Rigellian living in disguise, and arranges for transport.

* * *

Before he leaves, he decides to return to Cardiff one last time. It's fitting. Cardiff was his home for a century and a half; it's where he was dumped unceremoniously after the Doctor abandoned him in the Game Station; and, of course, it's where he spent the majority of his time on Earth waiting for the Doctor to return. Always the Doctor, he thinks bitterly as he climbs the low hill up to the graveyard. His memories of this world are full of people, names, faces, even if he can't always connect them; but beyond them all, the Doctor, the man who set him on this path in the first place, strings the points of his history together.

Jack knows this world better than his own now, but above all of it, one face will stand out in his memory, more than any other. Even if Ianto Jones hadn't made him promise, he'd still never let go of this one. The gravestone is simple, narrow and plain. Much like Ianto, he thinks, to those who didn't know him and saw only a quiet, still, sombre young man: young in body, maybe, but never in mind.

Jack wonders idly who took care of the stone, the burial. Gwen, most likely. She'd have taken over when grief weighed Ianto's family down from making the seemingly-meaningless decisions about caskets or urns, types of stone, manner of engraving. Gwen was good at things like that, always had been. He'll miss her, too, but he'll take with him the gratitude that she's still safe and alive and well on her way to bearing her first child. At least he managed not to fuck up Gwen's life irrevocably. That's something.

He sits next to the gravestone, beside rather than on the grave. The last time he held Ianto is etched indelibly in his memory; but he casts his mind further back, to a night at the Hub, the two of them curled in echoing shapes in the bunk under his office. The camp bed he'd used for years had become theirs, instead of just his. It's gone now, ancient history, like the Hub itself. Like Ianto. Like Steven. Like Gray. Like the last of his faith in himself. He doesn't weep; the tears have all been shed.

He'd been kidding himself to think he could ever be a hero, a leader. The con-man instinct is stronger in him than that of the soldier, the warrior. In the end it's all he knows, the grift, the sting. The final victim of his latest hoax had been himself, in the grandest scheme of all: convince himself that he could do better with his life. Instead, what has he done? Betrayed his blood; killed his lover, whose only crime was being in the wrong place at the wrong time; saved the world at the cost of his soul.

Jack stands and presses his hand to the cold stone, remembers warm skin under his palm, Ianto's gentle kiss. Without a backward glance, he strides away from the cemetery. Lines from Tennyson echo in his head in Ianto's voice, evoking the view from a cold bluff in Switzerland.

All things must die.

All but Jack.

* * *

It's easier to say goodbye to Gwen and Rhys than he thought it might. Gwen, glowing and huge with pregnancy, is his touchstone, his reminder that life will go on in spite of him and his endless fuck-ups. Though he's secured transport to the freighter, he's still glad to have the vortex manipulator back, an old and familiar friend, and the strap feels warm on his wrist when he secures it there. It makes the goodbye quicker: like ripping the plaster off a wound. Gwen's final sobs echo in his ears as the deck forms under his feet.

He works in the cargo bay to pay his way. The crew, a motley mix of humans and cat-folk, don't care what Jack does or who he sleeps with as long as he works hard and doesn't incite mutiny on board. Jack shifts cargo during the "day", drinks heavily and collapses into his bunk at the end of the evening. In between, there's an occasional tumble with some crew member or another, but he doesn't talk or stay past the act. He eats when he remembers to. He tries to forget.

For the first time in nearly two centuries, Jack tries to lose track of time. It's difficult for him to do; it's one of the reasons he was chosen for the Time Agency, one of the things they looked for in potential recruits. A natural tendency to time orientation, they called it: the ability to know when one is. He could be dropped naked on a raw world (and had, more than once), and still be able to place the century, the decade, and the time of day, merely from his place in the time flow. Even on Earth, he rarely needed a timepiece -- though he'd worn one anyway, simply for the style of it.

Thinking of watches makes him think of Ianto and his stopwatch, and he tries to drown himself in liquor. It doesn't work. The ship medic pumps his stomach after someone finds him passed out on the canteen deck, and, not for the first or the thousandth time, Jack wishes he were dead.

Gradually, though, by sheer effort -- no one could claim Jack Harkness isn't stubborn -- he begins to lose the days. It helps that his daily routine is so similar. Only occasionally is his routine broken up -- once by an order to do some EVA repairs, once by a holiday celebration that shuts down operations for nearly the entire crew. Jack doesn't care that his fellow workers in the cargo bay watch him warily, that the rest of the crew begins to avoid him. He doesn't drink before his shift; he's still conscientious enough (damn his soul, whatever's left of it) that he doesn't want to cause harm to the others or to the property. But the drink takes up the rest of his time and he lets it.

At least most nights, he's able to sleep dreamlessly, and it's not as if it matters if his liver shuts down.

* * *

They reach their port planet, a mining world in the Alpha Centauri system, in a few months' time. Jack collects his pay and leaves the ship without looking back. From there, he takes another transport, then another. He doesn't look at the destinations, his only goal for the moment to get as far away from Earth as quickly as possible. Most of the time, he's left alone and that's fine with him. He doesn't want to be bothered with feeling things anymore.

He wakes to find himself in rooms littered with trash, smelling of piss. He doesn't remember how he got there and he doesn't care. Sometimes there's another body next to him. Once in a while he wakes in the equivalent of a morgue and has to piece together memories of fights, of being stabbed or shot. None of it seems to touch him.

He stops sleeping altogether for a while in an attempt to stave off the dreams of Steven, Ianto, the dead of Torchwood. It doesn't work. He sees Ianto, tall and lean and impeccably dressed, out of the corner of his eye; when he turns to look, Ianto's gone. He sees little boys with bright blond hair everywhere he looks, and when he closes his eyes, they're still there, behind his eyelids. In a queue to board a shuttle to another planet, he sees a tall woman with long, curly hair and a beige coat, and has to physically restrain himself from the immediate desire to reassure himself that she's not Suzie. (Thankfully, he soon gets a glimpse of a dark-skinned face decorated with whiskers and can relax again.)

The worst is when he sees someone in any kind of grey or cream clothing. He's shaken with a vision of Gray as he was the last time Jack saw him -- frozen in cryogenic sleep, tucked away in a drawer of the morgue. Gray must be dead now, he has no doubt, from the damage done to the Hub; Jack drinks himself into a stupor to commemorate the fact that he's now the last survivor of his father's line.

* * *

For a very long time, the man has no name. He doesn't remember. The aliens tell him that it's to be expected. There are many others who are nameless as well. He is told why, but most of the explanation is too complex for him when they first give it. At the time, he was upset. He's told that's very natural, and he's had to learn to accept that his memories may never fully return.

If he knew any of the others before, he doesn't now. They're given numbers at first, to designate themselves, and he learns to answer to Fourteen. He watches the others, wondering if one of them was a lover or a friend, or if they were all complete strangers.

There is no Thirteen, for some reason. He doesn't know why, but it makes him feel lonely.

They were told, when they first came to this place, that they were all involved in an accident. They've been brought to this place to recover. It's not where they're from; all they're told is that it's far away. The concept of relative distance seems useless in any case, since none of them know where "home" might be.

The one thing the man is sure of is that they are with aliens. He knows this because the aliens are all above seven feet tall and have four arms. They are appealingly lanky; on seeing them, the man sometimes has an odd memory of stiltwalkers at carnivals (words that connect to nothing, only floating along, random images cluttering his brain). The man finds them comfortable and friendly and he likes to spend time with them. The others don't seem to feel the same way; this has led to a pronounced separation from the rest. The man doesn't really mind. He finds comfort in solitude.

And they are in a lovely place. The sun is warm, if slightly brighter than what the man is used to. The beach is white; the water washing up to it is a rich and deep blue, green with algae and kelp. Though words like 'sunscreen' flit through the man's brain, he never seems to find trouble with spending too much time in the sun. He spends hours walking or swimming. He thinks that there are things he must be doing, but when he expresses this to the aliens, they shake their heads and give him sad smiles.

Aichul is the name of the one with whom he spends the most time. It looks at him curiously when he says things like that, its eyes gentle, as if it wants to reveal more. But it never does, and the man learns not to push.

"Where will we go?" he asks one afternoon. They've walked far from the building that has become, for now, his home, though it can still be seen far across the curve of the bay. He seats himself under a low-branched tree, shaded by its wide leaves, back against a flat-sided rock. Aichul settles near him, folding its long limbs around itself.

"When you are fully recovered, we will find new places for you."

"What sort of places?"

"That cannot be determined until you are fully recovered."

The man has become familiar with the circular logic of the aliens by now. He nods, reaching for a fallen branch to strip the bark from it. "Will we be sent home?"

Aichul doesn't answer for a long time. He suspects that, in itself, is an answer. At last, though, it meets the man's eyes. "You can never return to the place from which you came," it says.

"Why?" he says, his gaze fixed on that alien face. The narrow eyes don't blink.

"You are dead," it replies.

* * *

"Jesus, will you look at yourself," says the voice, and Jack shudders himself awake. Early-morning sunlight shines directly into his eyes, piercing his brain, and he groans, shielding his eyes against the glare.

"What the fuck," he gasps, his voice thick.

"I have to say, even I've never seen you in a state like this." Disapproving tones and a sigh that reminds Jack so much of Ianto he can't stop from sitting up with a gasp. His eyes are already telling him different, though, even as they blearily focus on a red coat covered in braid.

"Fuck off," he says, and sits up, swinging his legs over the edge of the tiny bunk. He's taken a room in a micro-hotel while he works up the funds to get to another planet. He needs to keep moving, to keep running.

John Hart rests a hand on his bare shoulder and gives him what might actually be a sympathetic smile. "You're a wreck," he says.

"Thanks for your keen observation," Jack mutters. "Now get out." He rubs the heels of his hands into his eyesockets; the dull, throbbing headache continues, unabated.

"Don't you want to even know why I'm here?" Hart sounds hurt, and Jack barks a sharp, dry laugh.

"I don't think it's possible for me to care less," he says. Since Hart isn't moving, Jack gets up, ignoring the fact that he's naked, and stumbles into the tiny lavatory.

Hart only talks louder, to be heard through the closed door. "I need your help," he calls.

"Too bad," Jack replies as he pisses.

"You should at least listen to my proposition!"

Staring at his red-eyed, bleary countenance in the mirror, Jack pops the local version of paracetamol and ponders whether killing himself would get Hart to leave him alone. Probably not. "You really think I'm going to help you after what you did to me and my team?" he says instead.

"I had no _choice_ and you bloody well know it." Hart's quiet for a moment, and then he adds, "For what it's worth, I'm sorry. I heard about what happened with the 456."

"Go to hell," Jack grates, leaning hard on the sink.

"The thing is," Hart goes on, "that's why I think you'll want in on this."

"No more cons." Jack pours himself a glass of water and swallows it in one long, convulsive gulp. "I'm out. I've been out for a couple hundred years now."

"I _know_ that. It's not a con," Hart says, with the patience of an adult speaking to a five-year-old. "I need to break into the Time Agency."

Jack feels himself go cold. He opens the lavatory door and stares at Hart. " _What_?"

Hart's smile is smug now, his arms crossed against his chest. "I said, I need to break into the Time Agency. And you're the only one left who can help me."

* * *

Some time later, washed and dressed, Jack finds himself sitting at an outdoor cafe, eating what passes for a breakfast with John Hart. John's table manners are as atrocious as ever, but Jack's hardly one to talk; he's starving, and his habit of cramming his mouth full of food stems from childhood. Once they've eaten, sitting back with cups of something that vaguely resembles coffee, Hart activates his vortex manipulator. A three-dimensional image pops up above it: a narrow rod, perhaps two feet long, circuitry decorating either end. Jack recognises it as an energy store, essentially a fancy battery with an almost unlimited capacity.

"What do you want with that?" Jack asks, examining the holographic display, the rod slowly turning above John's wrist.

John gives him a glance. "It was taken from me," he says succinctly, killing the display, and Jack shakes his head. He doesn't want to know.

"At least tell me you have a plan," he says instead.

As it develops, John does; though the Agency has been disbanded and abandoned, the last remaining Time Agents scattered to the winds, there are still security systems and physical defences in place. The Time Agency wasn't publicised for a variety of very good reasons, so those who did have reason to know about its activities were often those with retribution in mind. Fortunately, John has blueprints of the facilities and access codes that he claims are current.

"Who's maintaining all of this?" Jack asks. John raises an eyebrow.

"Who says someone's maintaining it?"

Jack gives John a testy look. "Don't fucking play stupid with me, all right?" He puts down the cup of _faux_ -coffee. "The security's still active, that means someone's still keeping the place up. If it had been abandoned, no one would want to keep people out."

John rolls his eyes. "It doesn't matter," he says. "They won't notice us. We'll slip in under the radar."

Eyeing John warily, Jack gets to his feet and tosses a few coins down to cover their meal. "Let's get started, then. I still don't trust you."

"Duly noted," John mutters, sour, as he stands.

* * *

The Agency had been moved from time to time, owing to various needs for security and privacy; its last location, in the Naphroxes system, is a remote moon, terraformed with a thin atmosphere to support life. John jumps the ship into a wide orbit around the moon, and Jack watches the last home of the Time Agency, pale and dark, sling silently into view.

He draws a breath and lets it slowly out again. It doesn't really surprise him that he's shaking. His last memory of the Agency is blurred and painful; he'd left like a thief in the night, taking only the clothes on his back and the vortex manipulator he'd worn long enough that it felt a part of his body. It was the only plan of action he'd been able to conceive of taking when he'd woken up two days prior to realise that the previous two years of his life were gone. They'd implanted him with a false memory, something about a mission gone awry, but the patchiness of it had been the first clue of that most intimate theft.

"Easy," John says. Jack realises his hands are claws on the seat's armrests. He takes a deliberate breath and releases it.

"Have we been spotted?" he asks.

John shakes his head. "Not a bit. We're invisible to anything that might notice us."

"Then let's go," Jack says. "Get in and get out."

"I love it when you talk dirty," John says, reaching for the ship's controls. Jack rolls his eyes as he takes over the monitoring equipment.

The Agency is set up in a sprawling complex across a crater in the moon's northern hemisphere. To avoid notice, it's situated on the moon's dark side -- standard practise for a place that never officially existed -- which makes landing a trifle more difficult than normal. Both Jack and John are used to it, though, and the ship comes to nestle snugly in one of the many docking ports south of the complex proper.

"No sign of any attention," Jack says. He has copies of all the access codes in his wriststrap, and he watches the readouts, sure at any moment an alert will sound off. But everything stays blessedly silent.

"Then let's get moving before we get any, yeah?" John raises his pistol; Jack nods and follows him out the hatch.

Instead of heading for the main entrance, they creep around to a service door at the north-west corner of the building. John pops the door, a small one used primarily by cleaning 'bots, and they duck in, one at a time.

"Weird to be back, huh?" John says in an undertone as they jog down the disused corridor, a few dim emergency lights their only guides.

Jack rolls his eyes. "Not quite the homecoming I imagined," he says, and John laughs to himself.

It's not strange so much as disorienting; the sensation grows in strength as they move from one building to another, approaching the heart of the complex. They have to move in circles, turning away from their goal as often as they head toward it, but for Jack the off-putting feeling seems to stem from the weird quiet. Whenever he was here before, the buildings were always loud, humming with activity. The silence is eerie.

When they reach the centremost building, the service corridors end -- it's a security factor, protecting against the very thing they're doing, giving intruders no hidden approach to the building that housed the offices of the highest-ranked agents and administrators, and in its basements resided the banks of servers that served as the beating heart of the Agency in its operational days. That heart is stilled and dead now, and Jack can't help but feel a sense of loss for it.

John jerks his head in the direction of the stairs leading to the storehouse as they near it; this close to the central banks, neither of them dares speak aloud. At one point, an approaching noise startles both of them; John lifts his pistol, and Jack reaches for the Webley before remembering that it was lost in the explosion. Flattening himself to the wall, he scrolls through access codes in the wriststrap. In its day, the Agency housed several mobile defensive units.

Their discoverer turns out to be a 'bot -- but instead of the defensive unit Jack had been expecting, it's a maintenance worker, one of the larger tread-wheeled models, old and pitted with rust. Completely oblivious to their presence, it rumbles past them, utterly focused on the task at hand. Jack blows out a breath and glances at John.

"Who knew?" John mouths, shoulders shaking with silent laughter. Jack drops his head back against the wall and lets himself sag in relief before they begin to move forward again.

A few more levels down, they reach the first goal: the storehouses, used to keep everything from props (for the use of Time Agents needing particular styles of clothing and accessories on missions) to recovered items of all sorts. Many had been sold or dropped into cultures not evolved enough to make appropriate use of them, which generally resulted in major timeline disruption. They may well still be here, for all Jack knows; he doesn't care, though. His Time Agency days are long done. John has the location of his fancy battery, so Jack guards the door while John steals into the storage room.

Though his anger and resentment toward the Agency will probably never fade, Jack nevertheless feels a slight pang of nostalgia for the time he spent working here. It's sad to see the building fallen into disuse and neglect, maintained only by 'bots who were abandoned along with the buildings. The halls are empty, rather than bustling with activity. He remembers the first time he came here, how the complex thrummed with life, full of people who were all dedicated to preserving the timeline, to keep history on track. He was excited then, excited to be part of what seemed a mad venture to him, so different from his years in the military. There was the training: learning to use his vortex manipulator; being taught how to hone his natural time-sense to be able to pick out the slightest disturbances in the timelines. How to disguise oneself to fit into a time period while working a job -- training that had helped him greatly during his career as a con-man.

He's never learned why the Agency went under; John never told him more than to say it was shut down. Even now, when pressed, John won't give an answer. Maybe he doesn't know. Jack isn't sure he really needs the answer to that question. The time-stream adjusts; life moves on in spite of disturbances and disasters. Jack's living proof of that.

"Let's go," John hisses, at his shoulder, and Jack does his level best not to jump.

"Fuck," he mutters under his breath, shaking his head and following John down the hall. This is no time to let his mind wander.

They retrace their steps up to the main data storage level. It's spread out, sprawled on a storey of its own; where the storehouses were dark and tucked away, this floor is beautifully made to display the pillars of storage units, frosted glass sectioning each off above a wooden floor set with tasteful recessed lights. Jack shakes his head. What a waste of budget.

Here, the security is tighter, heightening Jack's suspicion that someone must still have some plans for the complex. It's useless to speculate right now, but the thoughts run unhindered in the back of his mind as he goes to one of the two security terminals. John mans the other. The access codes must be entered in the correct sequence and at the same time. With one eye on John and the other on his keyboard, Jack starts typing in the sequence of codes. He can't shake the feeling that they're being watched; if he had a third eye to spare, he'd be scanning the room for active CCTV. Instead, he finishes typing the last code and glances at John. In perfect time, they both press the 'transmit' keys.

The hum of electricity noticeably subsides in the room; the physical security, a laser forcefield surrounding the storage pillars, has been suspended. Nodding in satisfaction, Jack continues to type, seeking now the specific location of his property.

"Twelve fourteen CC two X," he says to himself when it comes up on the screen, and then darts down into the rows of storage caskets. Each looks exactly alike, a pillar of white, but Jack's wriststrap beeps when he approaches the right one. It's a simple matter of using the last of the access codes and pressing his fingers to the subtle indents on the front, and the door slides inward and out of the way with a faint, satisfied _hum_.

Nestled in a clear case are two memory crystals. Jack's hands shake as he reaches for them; he has to take a deep breath to try and calm himself before he lets his hands touch the case.

"Hurry up, will you?" John hisses from across the room. "We'll get caught if we're in here much longer."

"Caught by what," Jack growls, "a cleaning 'bot?" But he lifts the case from the casket, tucking it into the shoulder-bag he brought for this purpose. His memories. "Fuck you bastards," he says under his breath. "Try to get them back from me now."

* * *

Their return to the ship is tense and quiet. John leads the way, as before; Jack's distracted, jittery with the prospect of finally remembering two lost years of his life. It doesn't miss his attention that they're not stopped or challenged on the way out, though he's really too preoccupied to care.

John takes the ship back out of the atmosphere practically the moment the hatch shuts behind them. "Where to now?" Jack says, the bag with its precious cargo strapped into a locker at his feet.

"Safe place," John says briefly. "It's where I've been staying." Jack nods, ignoring the glance he feels John give him. He knows John's intent -- to get him to stay as well -- but he has no intent of taking John up on the unspoken invitation.

He still doesn't know where he's going. He doubts his memories will point him in a specific direction. For now, it'll be enough to know where he's been.

* * *

John's "safe place" turns out to be a backwater mining colony. He sets the ship in orbit and teleports them down to the surface. They materialize in a residential area a few miles from the main mine site. Standing on the pavement, Jack looks around in dismay.

"Is there someplace quiet around here?" Jack asks. Like most mining colonies, this one is populated largely by men who work and play equally hard, and the area reflects this in the many bars and pubs flashing neon signs and blasting loud music. Jack's spent months in places like this over the past year, but suddenly it's all a bit too loud and bright for him.

John seems to understand, to his relief. They commandeer a small electric vehicle -- the equivalent of a golf cart -- and John drives them away from the settlement until they reach an area with some vegetation and no houses for miles around. Grassy brownish-green leaves cover the ground, and Jack sits down heedlessly among them.

"You want to be alone?" John asks.

Jack glances up, then swallows. "No," he says. "Stay." And as John sits with him, Jack reaches for the first crystal.

A year of images and emotions and memories hit him in an instant. Jack reels, grabbing out wildly, brain exploding. There's so much, too much to take in all at once -- missions and friends and meals and assignments and trysts and spaceships and reports and overwhelming emotion. He feels something solid under his hand, but the sensory overload means that it's several moments before he recognises that he's clutching to John's arm, that John is holding him upright -- that he's unable to do so himself. "I'm all right," he gasps. "I'm all right."

Watching him warily, John relaxes his grip on Jack's shoulder. Jack leans forward, hands on his knees, sucking in air. "You screamed," John says.

Jack gasps and nods. "Yeah," he says in toneless affirmation. "Yeah. Shit! It's a lot to take in all at once."

John offers him a flask and Jack swigs from it. The alcohol, strong and raw, burns his throat, but Jack swallows it down. He needs it to soothe his nerves while the memories sort themselves in his head, settling into place one by one.

"I don't get it," he says softly after a minute or so of letting his head sort itself out. Everything seems to be there; he doesn't find gaps as he searches through. There was the Cxplton III mission, recovering future Earth tech -- stolen arms -- from a society not advanced enough to make heads or tails of it; after that, he'd been sent to some of the outer human colonies, a recruiting assignment with a total stranger who'd ended up a close friend. Refnarv, that was it. It's all there, but it's all innocuous. "Why that year?"

"What is it?" John asks.

Jack shakes his head, sitting back again. "There's nothing I can think of that -- that would explain why they took that year." He takes another quick swig from the flask and hands it back to John. "Maybe," he says, thinking aloud. "There's -- there was an assignment right at the end of the year." He shifts his head around as if trying to jog the last memory, but it's no good. "It stops right there. That must be it," he says, and eyes the second crystal where it sits in the case. His nerves still aren't settled from the first one, but the need to know is too powerful. He picks up the second crystal and aligns his fingertips with the input grooves.

Another wave of memories strikes him with the force of a physical blow. This time, he's a little more prepared for it. Even so, he's left reeling when the last image slots into his brain, and Jack clutches at John for support once more. The flask is applied to his mouth again, but Jack pushes it away this time, gasping for air. His stomach heaves.

"What is it?" John sounds distant, his voice echoing in Jack's ears.

Jack stares numbly at the empty crystals. In a raw voice, he whispers, "Ianto."

" _What_?" John demands.

"Ianto," Jack says, head on fire. "It was Ianto."

* * *

"What happened to us?" the man asks of Aichul. It's another day like every other, warm and clear, the sun sparkling off the waves. He walks along the beach, his steps aimless. Aichul keeps easy pace.

"It is not permitted to say," Aichul replies.

"Because we're not supposed to remember, or because we might?"

"It is better if you do not." Aichul won't elaborate, no matter how much the man presses. "It is better if you do not ask these questions at all, Fourteen," it says, in gentle warning.

"I have to know," the man says. "I need to."

"It will not help," Aichul says, its voice flat and devoid of inflection. "It is traumatic. The past is another country. You do not live there anymore."

The phrase sounds oddly familiar, but the man has no frame of reference and can only tuck it into memory for later examination. He glances up at the tall alien. "Curiosity killed the cat, is that it?"

Aichul makes a sound that the man has come to know as laughter. "In a sense, yes."

When they reach their usual resting place, the man settles, back against his rock, and closes his eyes. Aichul remains nearby. The alien often stays close, as if to protect him from injury, whether accidental or otherwise. Today, Aichul sits next to him; he can feel the warmth of its skin, similar to his own though entirely hairless.

"Humans need to know," the man says softly. "It's both a curse and a blessing with us. We seek answers." The memories are still murky in his mind, but lately things have begun to surface. Images of cities, of brick buildings and streets; nothing concrete enough to put names to, but he feels encouraged that he's getting back anything at all.

"You will have them," Aichul says, "when you are ready."

The man says nothing. It's pointless to ask when that will be.

* * *

_This is it_ , Jack thinks, staring numbly at the memory crystals. He only has to think back now and the image springs up behind his eyes, clear as day: Ianto Jones, two years younger than he was when Jack first met him, rough-edged and unpolished. His eyes gleam, though, as he looks up at -- well, it's like someone looking into a camera. Except in this case, the recording agent was Jack himself. This is Jack's memory, one of the lost ones, pulled from his brain and tucked away into neatly matrixed crystal storage. It's all there: the orders to go to Earth, to find one seemingly unimportant Welshman and convince him that he had a future with the first incarnation of Torchwood.

"I did this," Jack says, his voice broken. "Oh, God. I killed him."

"He'd have followed you into the abyss," John points out, gently. "You didn't do anything to him."

"I convinced him to work for Torchwood." Jack stumbles to his feet; his stomach turns and he represses the urge to vomit. "It was what they ordered me to do. The time-stream would have been -- irrevocably disturbed -- if he didn't work there. So I sent him there."

 _Like a good soldier_ , he thinks, and now he does stumble away until his knees hit the dirt and his stomach empties itself of hastily-swallowed liquor. He drops forward to his hands and chokes out the bile until there's nothing left. John pulls him back eventually, wiping his mouth and letting him sob.

It had been such a simple assignment at the time. Jack had taken it with the prospect of a vacation, a chance to see Earth in one of its most exciting eras. Then there was the target, the young man who needed a job: also appealing, in quite a different way. Ianto Jones had been young and lovely and lost, on the dole and scraping out a living in London. It was far too easy for Jack to find him, to chat him up. Though he might have claimed to be straight, Ianto blushed prettily when Jack flirted with him, and he took the card and the suggestion to apply to Torchwood with no hesitation. Jack had felt the time-stream quiver in an unpleasant way when he tried to push for a little more, though, so he'd dosed Ianto's pint with just enough amnesia pill that the man would only remember the job, not Jack himself. A tragedy, Jack remembers thinking, and that he'd hoped he'd have another assignment to Earth so he could revisit this particular man's life.

Now, curled into himself, Jack thinks back on his long, long life. From boyhood, innocence ripped away too soon in the loss of his brother and father, to war against the ravaging things that tore his family apart. A different sort of war, a fight against the breaching of time itself in the service of the Time Agency. Being cut loose -- because he remembers it all now, the lost memories connecting once again in his brain like they'd never been wiped -- and being given a reason, a motivation to strike out against the Agency. They'd placed him perfectly in the Doctor's path, he thinks, like baiting a hook. For what reason? What was the prize? The loss of his humanity? The death of his soul?

They couldn't have foreseen what would happen to him after that, though. The Doctor was untrackable; one could observe where he'd been, but no amount of looking back over history could determine where he'd appear next. He might pop up in some galaxy on the far side of the universe or to witness some event in Earth's history; and the Daleks had spent a long time labouring to bring their own plans regarding him to fruition. It was the Daleks' fault, really, that Jack was cursed with eternal life. But then, no one could have predicted that Rose Tyler would open the TARDIS and look into its heart, that she'd save the entire universe from Dalek ambition and grant Jack Harkness eternal life as an afterthought.

It would have been easier, he thinks blindly, if he'd been left to die on the Gamestation. At least then he could have been posthumously considered a hero. Instead, he lives, a monster. How many have died, if not at his hands, then by his actions? All of the Torchwood team he assembled -- save Gwen, who was a later addition. Owen, Toshiko, Suzie. Ianto. Steven. He falls asleep counting names.

* * *

When he wakes, he's in the tiny lower bunk of the ship again. John must have brought him back, he thinks as he shifts to sit up, carefully ducking the overhead structure of the upper bunk, and rubs his forehead. He feels the dull throb of a headache, magnified by the steady hum of the engines shaking the ship around him. They're on the move again, then. Good.

Making his way up to the front of the ship, he finds John at the helm and nods absently. "What's the plan?" he asks as he drops into the other chair.

"Ah, you're awake," John says, and spares Jack a brief smile. "Right now, the plan is just to keep moving. I doubt we'll be followed, but just in case."

"And then?"

John's silent a moment before replying. "Well. That's up to you, I suppose," he says. "I personally was looking forward to finding a party and getting very drunk." He tilts a glance up at Jack, ever hopeful. "You could come with me."

The idea sounds tiring, and Jack shakes his head. "Maybe you'd better let me off somewhere."

"That's what I figured you'd say," John says. When he glances at Jack again, he's wearing a philosophical smile. "I know I wore my welcome out last time."

"Not that," Jack says absently, and is surprised to find he means it. "It's just." He drops his head back, eyes closed. "I have to move on."

John makes a soft sound of agreement, not meeting his eyes. It feels shameful that Jack should be getting lessons in humanity from John Hart, of all people, but at least he's beginning to recognise it.

* * *

Another day, the man wakes to learn that some of the others have slipped away in the night. Aichul and several of the other aliens make a point of mentioning this as they all sit to breakfast, a meal designed for nutrition rather than flavour. The man isn't surprised, not really. The longer they're kept in this place, the more restless they become.

"Your companions cannot go far," Aichul says to the group. "This island is large enough that it will take some days for them to cross it, but in the end they will only find ocean on the other side."

"This place is a prison," mutters the woman sitting near the man: Forty-seven, he remembers. "They're keeping us prisoner here."

"Could be worse," the man says, philosophically, and she looks up at him, her eyes narrowing.

"'Worse'?" she asks, her voice cold. "Tell me how much worse it can get. Sure, it looks like paradise, but we can't leave, we don't have any contact with our families--"

"Do you remember?" the man asks, purely curious. Memories slip back to them one at a time, unconnected.

Forty-seven sighs and looks down at her bowl of brown glop. "I had a son," she says. "I -- I remember his face. He had brown eyes, like mine. A scar, on his chin, from when he fell down and hit his chin on a rock when he was three." Her voice quavers. "But I don't remember his _name_."

The man dares a gentle hand on hers, an attempt at comfort. Her gaze tracks to their hands, then up to his face. Abruptly, she pulls her hand away, her eyes darkening with anger.

"Leave me alone," she spits. She gets up, abandoning her food, and stalks away. Another of the aliens drifts after her. The man feels the other humans' eyes on him and occupies himself with his bowl.

* * *

John drops Jack back where he found him, in the same tract of housing on the same port planet. Jack doesn't resist the hug John gives him, or the kiss. John gives his shoulder a pat and steps back, opening his wriststrap.

"See you 'round," he says, pressing buttons. Jack nods absently; there's no doubt in his mind he'll run into John Hart again. The Universe has a way of throwing the same people in his path again and again.

When John has teleported back to his ship, Jack turns to go back to the flat he'd been leasing. He has a few personal items to claim, and some information to look up. Thoughtfully, he slides a thumb over the tiny data-chip John pressed into his hand.

* * *

That night, Aichul comes to the man's room.

They all have individual rooms -- suites, really, almost like flats, with two big rooms and a washroom. There is little decoration, but the man thinks that he doesn't need much with so much natural beauty around them; all he has to do is open the windowshades to see all he wants. Tonight he has left them open, and the windows as well, to let in the gentle evening breeze, scented with flowers whose names are unpronounceable to him.

The aliens have provided them with little in the way of recreational activities; they have a few chess sets, though, of which the man has claimed one. He was never very good at chess, but he does remember the rules, and it's a way to pass the time. He's sitting at the small table, contemplating possible moves -- his opponent is himself -- when the door-tone sounds. The man looks up as the door opens and Aichul peers in.

"May I?" it asks. The man shrugs and nods, and Aichul slips in and closes the door behind itself.

Aichul's mind for chess is much sharper than the man's, but he takes his time, letting the man work through strategies on his own. When the man finally moves a last knight and Aichul declares checkmate, the man doesn't feel as if he's been beaten too badly. He's smiling as he leans back.

Aichul reaches across the table and covers the man's hand with one of his own. The man feels an unexpected rush of heat at that simple touch; his startled gaze flies up to meet Aichul's.

"Is this acceptable?" Aichul asks.

"What are you doing?" the man says, struggling to catch up once again.

"I thought," Aichul says. It's the first time the man has seen the alien stutter or hesitate. "Perhaps you might wish comfort. You are lonely."

Something squeezes in the man's chest. A name flashes into his head and is gone just as quickly, before he can grasp it. But he turns his hand to curl his fingers around Aichul's. The alien's fingers are long and narrow, like its body.

"I have been," he admits, and stands.

When he wakes much later, Aichul has gone. The bed is cool again. This time, the name stays in the man's thoughts. He pins it firmly, though it makes his chest ache to think of it.

 _Jack_.

* * *

Jack secures transport all the way out to the Naphroxes system, but he has to borrow a shuttle to fly himself the last leg of the journey. No one travels out there; hardly a surprise, since they're not supposed to know what's there. Jack feels that sense of vertigo again as he sets down at the docks, leaves the shuttle behind and strides up to the front doors of the place.

It's not as if he has anything to hide from now. Let whoever's keeping the Agency alive -- because someone is, he knows it -- see him. What can they do to him?

He opens the doors and goes into the main atrium. It's huge and echoing, a vast empty space, sadly reminiscent of its heyday. Dust covers every surface and collects in the corners; the cleaning 'bots are failing, one by one. Jack sneezes and continues up the wide stairs, through the mezzanine-level lobby, turning by instinct toward the corridor to the central building. Where they travelled in hiding before, now he walks in the open. The lights are all on; he'll be seen by anything and everything. It hardly matters now.

He takes the stairs up to the top level of the administrative floors. In his career as a Time Agent, he'd only had cause to visit this area once: on completion of his training, when he'd been invested as a full Agent. The head of the Agency had been there, along with his fellow graduates and instructors; they'd received a stirring speech praising their achievements and expressing hope for their future careers with the Agency. Jack strolls past empty offices, long-abandoned desks, computer equipment now far out of date by current galactic standards. His footsteps ring hollow on the tile. Lights blaze in the ceiling ahead of him, marking his path. It leads him on, unerringly straight, to the place where he fully expected to wind up.

At the door, Jack pauses, squares his shoulders. He doesn't need to check his wriststrap to know that someone's waiting for him within; he's been aware of that since he entered the building. The strange thing is that he's nervous.

It was the information on the data-chip John gave him that led him here. His suspicion that the Agency isn't as abandoned as originally thought has been borne out; John knew someone had taken over the closed complex, but not who. "Get some answers," he'd whispered to Jack when he'd palmed him the chip.

Now, Jack takes a deep breath and releases it again. Maybe at last the cosmic joke of his life will make some sense. Heart in his throat, he pushes open the door to the office of the head of the Time Agency.

The person standing inside the office, on the far side of the wide desk, is literally the last person Jack had ever expected to see again. While he's still gaping, slack-jawed with shock, the man turns toward him, then walks around the desk, hands sliding into his pockets.

"Jack," he says softly in an accent Jack remembers far too well.

Wrenching his jaw shut, Jack puts a hand on the door frame to hold himself up. "I," he starts. "I don't."

"I know," says Ianto Jones. "I'm dead."

* * *

"But how?" Jack finally manages. "I don't -- I don't understand."

"The Betaraens cloned us," Ianto says. They've moved to a sofa by the door, after Jack's legs threatened to give out on him. Jack watches Ianto warily, still not entirely convinced that he isn't hallucinating. "Well. Not cloned, exactly. An exact genetic print, that's the term they used. They took copies of us -- of everyone who died in Thames House. Except you."

"Because I came back," Jack says. He still remembers it, the gentlest of all his revivals, Gwen between him and Ianto's corpse.

Ianto nods. "They're attracted by disasters," he says, musing. "It's some sort of genetic need they have, to fix things. Especially for those who died before their time."

Jack finds himself looking away. "What," he says, in a voice that manages to remain mostly steady. "What about Steven?"

"I'm sorry," Ianto says. He begins to reach to Jack, to touch him, but then stops, his hand jerking back to his own lap. "They couldn't get to him to make a print. I even asked them to, but they said it was impossible."

It takes Jack a moment to clear his throat. He hadn't expected it, but the momentary hope still chokes him, sour in his craw. "So they cloned you," he says to get off the subject.

"And gave me all my memories," Ianto adds, nodding. "So I -- I'm not. Not technically the Ianto you knew."

Jack looks up at Ianto. At this perfect genetic copy of Ianto. He smells the same; the voice is identical. He recognises freckles on Ianto's cheek, the way his short hair curls just a little, silken, at the back. Even the suit is a match to the ones Ianto wore. If he hadn't felt Ianto die in his arms...

"Why are you here?" Jack asks, feeling suspicion begin to grow once more. Ianto folds his hands and looks down for a moment. When he glances up at Jack again, eyes dark under his long lashes, Jack's heart squeezes painfully.

"We couldn't be sent back to where we came from," Ianto says softly. "There was no arguing that with them. Most of us -- most of them," he specifies, "were placed in new homes." He shrugs briefly. "A lot of them were happy to go to a little village on the seaside on a world near here. A sort of early retirement. But once I had all my memories back..." Ianto stands now, hands finding his pockets again. "I couldn't just go sit in some cottage for the rest of my life."

"So you reopened the Time Agency," Jack says, a chuckle forcing itself from his throat. Typical Ianto: he'd never been one to sit still for long.

"I remembered how you'd said it was shut down," Ianto says, his throat working as he watches Jack. Jack remembers that, too: it was on the date he'd promised to Ianto when John Hart first showed up in Cardiff. "It seemed to me that there was a need for it, especially once the Betaraens said history was still suffering from disruptions. I... I felt like I might have a bit of aptitude for it."

"Only you," Jack says admiringly, his throat too thick to say more. He swallows hard against it.

"Well, there's still a lot to do," Ianto says, self-effacing as ever. He stops by the window, face turned toward a view of the sprawling complex around them. "First thing is to get back all the Time Agents that are left. Even," he says with a short laugh, "John Hart."

Jack looks across the room. Ianto's so slim, his skin tanned from months spent recuperating on the sunny, water-washed world used by the Betaraens as a recovery ward for those they've rescued. He'd heard of them, but never met them. He knows how they operate, though. Physically, it's true, this isn't his Ianto. But Jack has reason to know just how little physical form matters. Memories define him; he clings fiercely now to the two years he'd lost -- and the two hundred or so surrounding them. It doesn't matter that the body is new. The mind and heart are those of Ianto Jones.

Jack swallows hard and rubs a hand across his eyes. It seems too good to be true. He's mourned Ianto for nearly a year (despite all his attempts to forget about the passage of time, he still knows exactly how long it's been); now he feels lost, floundering, thin air under his feet.

"How about it?" Ianto says. Jack looks up to see Ianto standing before him, his dark eyes guarded. Jack blinks up at him; Ianto's smile appears, brief and without warning, a flash of sun in a cloudy Cardiff sky.

"How about what?" Jack repeats.

"Will you come back to the Agency?" Ianto asks.

Two years of lost memories surge back to remind Jack of why he left. They'd sent him to persuade Ianto to work for Torchwood, and in doing so had been screwed over by the very people who had ordered him to the job. If they hadn't done that, he wouldn't have left; wouldn't have become a con man; wouldn't have met the Doctor and Rose; wouldn't have become head of Torchwood; wouldn't have met Ianto. His head whirls. The circle never stops turning.

Without looking, he reaches up and takes Ianto's hand. Ianto is warm and real, alive. Jack tugs and Ianto comes down against him, half on the couch, half on Jack. His surprised laugh fills Jack's ears.

"Yes," Jack says, hoarse against Ianto's throat, and then finds Ianto's mouth with his own. He's aware of his own tears, but it hardly seems to matter, especially when Ianto kisses them away.


End file.
